Arming Sales Teams To Win in the Market, with Brent Adamson

Welcome to the positioning show where we discussed topics related to the practical application of positioning for marketing, sales, and product teams. I'm April Dunford, a consultant, author, and the world's leading expert on positioning for BAB technology companies. Hi, welcome to another edition of the positioning show with me, April Dunford. How are you doing? So great to see you. Hey, got a guest on the show today. I'm super excited to have Brent Addamsen. You know, back when I started this podcast a year or so ago, Brent was on my list of people that I really wanted to get on the podcast. You might know him as the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. This is the groundbreaking work that he did when he was part of CEPB, the corporate executive board, which then got acquired by Gartner, and he did a lot of good work with the Gartner folks talking about customer indecision. You also might know him for a really great article in Harvard Business Review called Sense Making for Sales. If you haven't read that, I think you should. It had a really big impact on me and my thinking around not just positioning, but also how we take positioning and translate it into a sales pitch. And a lot of my understanding of what works and doesn't work in sales comes from the research that Brent was leading or participating in back when he was CEPB and also at Gartner. So it's really, really cool to get him to come onto the podcast and talk to me. He's also just a super fun guy to talk to. So we had a really great conversation about what works, it doesn't work on sales teams, what he's seeing in the future, what he's seeing in the past, things that he thinks we should think about when we think about specifically, how do we arm sales teams to go out when in the market? I think you folks are really going to enjoy this conversation. I know I did. Let's get into it. I'm so happy to have you on the show, Brent. It's so great. How are you? I'm good, April. It's a long time coming, although we didn't know it was a long time coming, but now that we're here together, it seems like, boy, this we should have done a long time ago. So I'm super excited. Yeah, we should have done this a long time ago, but now we're doing it. So it's good. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the reasons I want to have you on is, like, so, Challenger Sale and Challenger customer too, which in my opinion doesn't get read enough. I agree. But challenger sale is probably the book that I've recommended the most, like across my entire career, what people say, you know, whatever you're going to podcast, someone says, recommend some books. And it's always on the list of books. And, um, that doesn't work for me because I can't say, have you read my book because that would just be cringy and weird. Do you know what I mean? That's, I guess so. Yeah, I guess that's true. Like, when people ask you for a recommendation, no, you can't say your own book. But have you read, hold on, wait a minute, have you read this because that right there is obviously awesome. So that's a power. There you go. Absolutely. You're listening. He's holding up my book. That's very exciting. That's what I'm going to say. I'm going to say, oh, like, oh, so I want to talk about Challenger Sales a little bit, but I also want to talk about, um, this article you wrote for Harvard Business Review calls that's cool for sales because I, I, that also had a big impact on me in the way I think about a lot of bunch of stuff. But anyways, um, so I wanted to start with, you know, not everybody's familiar with Challenger Sales. You know, the kids these days, um, maybe haven't, haven't read it, but, you know, in Challenger Sales, you folks were looking at what top performing sales reps were doing different from reps that were not top performing. Were you folks surprised like when you did that original research, were you surprised at what you found or is that was, was the going in hypothesis that it would look like that? I always wanted to know whether you guys thought it was going to be like, oh, well, I'll tell you all the, did it go, did it go in a way you were like, what? We didn't think it was going here. So, so two thoughts. And so the, the folks were the, uh, is the team at corporate executive board, which then of course became CB, which was then ultimately acquired by Gartner in at the time, uh, corporate executive board in the sales practice, uh, the way back machine, no one really cares, it was called the sales executive council at the time was the sales practice within the corporate executive board. I remember the sales executive council. Yeah, that was us. So, so 2008, you know, we were for those of us who were selling them, we all remember 2008's hard to forget. It was a disaster because no one was selling it. Terrible. And that's when we launched right in the sort of the thick of those, the, that year, uh, launched this study of trying to understand what the best sellers were doing that was so different. And that, we laid kind of that background out in the book. And specifically to your question, um, were we surprised? So the answer is kind of yes and no. So back then it was our sort of mode of working. So every year we do one of these very large quantitative driven studies of sales. And of course we had colleagues down the hall doing marketing and supply chain and HR. And so this is what we did at corporate executive board and I worked with the marketing and the, and the sales teams, um, the research teams I should say. And the, uh, so every year we asked questions and inevitably we'd get back data that bent our brain in some fashion or the by far the most mind bending thing we ever found in our research is the highlight or chapter one and the challenger customer, which I'll just put a pin in that we come back to talk about that if you want. But for challenger, um, we actually had already seen the, in the study we'd done the previous year, we'd actually already landed on this idea of commercial insight. I don't know if we named it commercial insight yet at that time, but we'd begun to already see in our research going back actually to a marketing study that we had done probably three years previous that the companies, the brands, and there's all B2Bs. So the companies that tend to win and drive loyalty that is growth with customers, not just customers to stick around, but customers that grow with you over time had this ability to teach those customers something new about their business. So that core premise was already there in the findings. And so when we built the challenger study, which was specifically not about companies, but about, you know, sellers individually, we built some of that hype those hypotheses into the attributes that we were testing. Um, and lo and behold, they kind of shook out as maybe not surprising. This we'd already found in some ways that the best companies were doing this. So in some ways, it wasn't a real surprise that the best reps were doing this. Um, I will tell you though, April, and you maybe appreciate this one. So it was 55 different attributes were testing. So different behaviors and skills and knowledge and we all lay all that out in the book in terms of what we were testing in that particular study that became the challenger sale. But when we first ran the research and the data, we got it all back. It all came back in the form from our head of research or quantitative analysis time, Gunning Timmer, Hitchell, and so still out there in amazing and brilliant. And when, when Timmer first presented the data to us, he presented it to us as a bar chart of those 55 attributes. And what's really interesting is the 55 attributes that is the 55 bars in the bar chart were almost all identical. So really? Yeah, no, really, right? So you'll, I mean, they were like, you know, it wasn't like, we're always looking for at least back in the day, it was we were looking for a phenomena we called big bar little bar, which is like one really big bar, one really small bar. And that's the interesting story is always in the variability of the data, right? And this data was, there was some variability, but it wasn't a big bar little bar. It was like 55 things and you kind of have to be good at it all. And it's like, well, it's like sad trauma. And it's like, what do we do now? We just, and six months gathering data that says you got to be good at 55 things. Let's go to the market and tell them that in the world's worst down economy. You can appreciate it. That was a dark day at that table, right? So we don't, we don't put this in the book. You out of the backstory. This is the backstory. So, so then what happened is that to my, um, ran what's called a factor analysis, which is just a cluster analysis on the data and tried to figure out how these different 55 attributes tended to group. And so when, when did certain attributes like when I'm good at this, what else am I typically good at when I'm bad at this? What am I typically, or like not as good when I'm typically not as good at? And so the, and lo and behold, there was a statistically significant grouping of these, these attributes into these five statistically distinct buckets or profiles or categories. We ultimately called them profiles. And so once we found that, then we just compared them to commercial performance and likelihood to be a star performer and out popped, that's five groups and like we had to give them names. So we called the one that won challenger because they were out teaching customers or challenging customers, something new. I'd been on the road doing sales kickoff, um, you know, keynotes during that season. So I came back, the team sat down so that we were really excited to show this to you. They showed it to me, um, laid it all out. And so we're going to call this challenger and I said, that's a horrible idea. That's a space shuttle. It blew up. We're not calling the challenger. Um, and then they said, Brent, you're wrong. We're calling it challenger because that's how things rolled back then and, and they were right. And, and the rest is history. There you go. And did you ever get, did you ever get pushed back on that, on that name? Like I'll tell you, right now, I feel like there is, there is, it's been a few years, right? So, but people misunderstand what challenger is. And I think a lot of people come to me and they'll say, Oh, I, you know, I know all about challenger. It's, you know, it's, it's about you going in and telling customers what they should do. And it's like that word. People have a reaction to that word. Like we're not allowed to be, we shouldn't be challenging customers or, and there's this kind of negative connotation to it. Like did you ever get that push back? And like what do you say when you get that push back? Uh, endlessly is the answer to people. I'm just assuming that you do because like I get it. And I'm not you. You must get it like every day. Like what I tell you, I'll just tell people like what's fun is, but, but it, but as a result, it allows us to engage in conversations that we wouldn't have had otherwise. So as a positioning expert, I think you'll totally appreciate this. Right. And so, and particularly, this is a quick footnote. My background before I came to research sales was researching linguistics. I'm a linguistics, uh, PhD. So I, I love language. Language is sort of my playground, right? And so not surprisingly, I was like a pig in slap at sea because we'd sit around and debate for literally enough for days or for hours, but for weeks, what we would name things, right? And so, and challenger was no different. And the idea is when we first looked at the language, the language, the language, the with this. We said, well, these best sellers are approaching customers in some sort of fundamentally different way. They're not showing up saying what's keeping you up at night. They're showing up with an insight saying, here's something that should be keeping you up with night. Now, we can again, park for a little bit. Come back to if you want. Like you have to do that culturally correctly. You have to do that diplomatically. So this isn't as Matt Dixon likes it. We didn't call the profile the jerk. Right? That would be bad, right? But nonetheless. So and again, since since you're a backstory kind of person, so I'll do this. That's what people think. Like people think I'm going to come in there and be a jerk about it. You're right. But we were solving. I'm sorry, interrupted you, but you're right. No, no, go ahead. Go ahead. But we were solving for a different problem, though, which is we weren't solving for will they accept it? What we were solving for was the the false positive problem. And this is, you know, people say like, so this is what keeps me up at night. So we were in a business at the time. I still am today of being deeply contrarian, but in a helpful way. That's why I call myself sort of a, you know, I like this, this whole idea of productive disruption. Like how can I help us think differently about something in a way that's productive, right? And in order to be disruptive, you have to get, you have to create a contrast. If you want to get geeky about it, it's like a Hageelian dialectic, right? It's like a thesis and antithesis that the meaning is constructed in the difference between two things. And so you have to construct a difference. You have to create a gap into which meaning can be created, right? And so here's the back story. The back story is we looked at these profiles. We said, okay, this person is approaching customers in a different way. They're challenging or teaching. So, but that is the really the basis of the new relationship. Uh-huh. I've got it. Let's call this the new relationship builder. So that was our first name. There was the old relationship builder and the new relationship builder. And we began to talk about this and we tested it briefly, but you didn't need a lot of market testing to know that as soon as you set out and said there's a new relationship builder, 90% of the people we're going to see this, we're going to say, oh, yeah, I do that already. And we knew from data that they didn't do it already. So this is the false positive problem. So whenever we've come up with these new ideas and share them with people, whenever we heard from someone, this confirms a lot of what I'm already doing or this is a confirmatory or this, this, this, um, this is like, we have this problem a lot, right? Exactly. And the new, the new Coke or the new thing, like it's just been proven that that doesn't work over and over and over again. There's lots of people out there saying like, oh, we're the new whatever. And it's actually really hard because what you're doing is anchoring off the old thing. And then everybody thinks you're just the old thing. There's no, exactly right. Ignore the new part. Yeah. So we had to create some sort of contrast and, and our goodness knows we managed to do that. So, yeah. So we called it the challenger because what they were doing was challenging customers, thinking and then so now what that did lead and for so I solved the false positive problem because part of that story was relationships, but it created two new problems. One is you're saying relationships don't matter. So then I had to back pedal in the relationships matter, but it's a relationship like this, not like that, but allowed me to engage in that conversation because because now you're opening posture to me is you're saying relationships don't matter as opposed to your opening posture to me as I agree relationships do matter. Do you see them say it's a totally different conversation? Right. And then the flip side is challenge it then so I had to bring you off of your relationship position, but I had to bring you to the challenger position. So, so there it is. So be a challenger, hold on challenger's obnoxious, it's jerky, it's, you know, it's it's typically, particularly outside of the US, it's so American, right? It's like here, the Americans showing up and telling me what to do. You bastard, right? So the, I got a lot of this. So the, so the, so the Europeans with that, I never thought I'd have to be right. Right. And I tell you and with a huge respect, and this isn't tongue and cheek is a huge respect. The Japanese in particular were very upset with them, not upset, but they had a heart, they struggled with the language because it's just antithetical to our culture that you would show up and challenge someone, particularly personally. Yeah. And so, so the back off there, and you know, there's a, we could dive into this if you want, but, but I'm kind of at the metal level now, but the shorter inside the story version of that is, yeah, I sat down with a group of Japanese managers once that a company I was working with and I said, well, think about your best clients and they said, okay, right? So I'm going to think about why are they your best clients and is it okay? And I said, I don't know why, why do you have such a great relationship with them and say, well, because we bring them new ideas and we help them think about their business in ways that I haven't thought of. It's all I'm talking about is, oh, if that's what you mean, they were on board, right? So, so it wasn't too hard to get someone on board with the word challenge or once they understood what it was. And so I was solving for the bigger problem of the false positive than the false negative. And so that's why we chose the language that we did. Make sense? That makes sense. That's hard though. It means you wind up arguing with everybody. But I kind of like that. So I'll go, okay. All good things though come from a little bit of friction, right? Like if we were all agreeing about everything then there wouldn't be, you know, there wouldn't be. There's two things I want to come back to you. So one is, so one, one is this thing you said about, you know, you set out in the worst economy of all time to figure out, like, how do we sell when everything is so bad? And look, here we are in the crappy economy again, like do you think, like, how do you feel like the Challenger stuff holds up, like particularly in this situation we're in right now where everybody's complaining about the economy. So this is a, you tell me if you want to go, because this could take us into another hour because I'm working on essentially the next book and the next body research. And I think in many ways, I'm so excited. I know I am too. I'm also terrified. Let's talk about that. But no, this question and then let's go. This kind of where it goes because where it goes is Challenger as we know. And by the way, so just to be super clear on that, it doesn't matter a lot, but people kind of find this interesting and sort of curious. So because we produced all the challenge work at the corporate executive board, which is then bought by Gartner, which then we built a training business around where my colleagues built a training business around, which then Gartner decided they didn't want to be in, which totally fine. It's a great business. We're just not a training company. So they spun that out. So there's now a company called Challenger. And they own all of the IP, the books, the training, all of that is owned by this company of which I am not affiliated. So I have no official affiliation with Challenger. I just have a belief in the body of work because they were on a great podcast. Yeah. And Jen Allen was there for a while. She's a dear friend of a lot of friends who have moved through that company over the years. There's a few still there. But the thing that is still actually true and nonetheless is that we did the original research in 2008. The book came out in 2011. And the world has changed and moved on. A little bit since then. So I think my position on Challenger today is I still 100% stand by it. In other words, if you're posh your towards customers is to show up and say, what do you got to get right this year? What's keeping you up a night? Or what are you working on? And you're asking the customer to essentially educate you. You're not really bringing anything of real value to that particular organization. So that's so bringing insight. That's still so true. I mean, 100% talking good sales reps are in particular leaders of great sales teams. Yeah. Like that that hasn't changed a bit. I agree. By the way, even back in in the day, I've sound so old now, but back in the day are you off my lawn? But I just tell any of your listeners who are now 35 years old, the road from 35 to 55 is a blink of an eye. That's all I can say. It's a blink of an eye. But in any case, you know, people would look at Challenger originally and they they'd always it's so interesting that people want to dismiss it, which is totally fine. I have no problem with it, but one of the ways they would dismissively react to it is say there's nothing new here. And I think they were kind of resentful that it was taking off the way it was. And they say there's nothing new here. My best people are doing this already. So all you did was give a name to something my best people are already doing. And my response was always the same, which is absolutely true. It's like we know your best people are doing this already because it wouldn't have shown up in the data. Unless it was already happening. So the question isn't what are your best people? What are my best people doing? Is that exactly right? So how do I how do I take that and package it and bottle it and export it to everyone else? That's really what we're up against, right? And I think if you fast forward today, it's still the same thing, which is the best sellers are still engaged in this behavior and a whole set of other behaviors. But it's really the story for me today is not so much how selling has changed, which is what we're always focused on in sales. And for that matter marketing. And you know, I just I want to put my marketing hat on and I hang out with Matt Hines and others in the marketing world and all my buddies over there, you know, be to be marketing such a. I know we're constantly talking about the same sort of phenomenon. But the the thing that's interesting is that it's not so much selling or marketing has changed. The marketing's probably changed a lot in terms of technology and all that kind of stuff. But the fundamental stuff in marketing doesn't actually change all that much. Like did techniques change a lot, right? Yeah. It tactically stuff changes. But the good-repinning stuff like, you know, positioning, for example, be one of those things like that's not something that changes every year. Thank goodness, right? Yeah. Otherwise, otherwise, we'd be obsolete and whatever there'd be nothing to learn from. But you know what? You know what has changed though? I think April, the thing that's so interesting to me is what's changed radically in the last 10 years is the customer context or the buying context. Absolutely. If you will more broadly, the deciding context. This has become so much more difficult and so much more complex for customer stakeholders to make these large-scale decisions on behalf of their companies. So whether it's five or six or seven or maybe even eight-figure deals, whether it's pounds or euros or dollars or whatever, they're spending huge amounts of money on long-term bets. Although as we get into the recurring revenue models, maybe the bets are, which is interesting, but that's a whole other conversation. If you move to a monthly basis or a renewal basis or even a consumption basis, but one way or another, they're making pretty large scale bets on behalf of their company. But even in those cases where it's renewals, stuff and whatever, like change management, like making a project. If we're talking about enterprise stuff, like you say six figure deals, seven figure deals, eight figure deals, like these are big deal decisions. These are not like click on the thing and sign up for my $100. It's not a product led sort of individual consumer sort of thing, right? Whatever you're buying, whether it's a long or a monthly basis or a yearly basis, whatever it is, it's still de-placing something. Whether it's displacing a DIY or I'll tell you what it's really displacing. The manual processes and all kinds of stuff. Exactly. You know what, it's really displacing to your point is it's displacing a set of relatively ingrained behaviors. It's not just a machine or a technology, but it's a culture, it's a set of behaviors, it's a set of activities, it probably set of metrics and measurements and maybe even things like compensation structures. And so it's highly disruptive. And in that environment in which customers are making those kinds of decisions, for reasons we can discuss if you want, but there's more people involved in that decision than ever before. As those bigger solutions touch more people in the customer organization across IT and internet and our data security and you name it different industry or different geographies. People are purchasing, bloody hell of it, right? So that's like, you know, the last number is that we touched a gardener. I think it was on average, there's 11 people and typically involved in it would be to be purchased. It goes up every year, like we used to say, we used to say five to eight and then it was seven to nine. And then again, I saw this 11 number, the other day, I was like, how does anybody get one of these deals done, man? That's exactly right. Right. So the last survey that at least I was involved with a gardener was 11.9, I don't know, 8, 11.9. I was talking to a tech company that we would all know just last week and they said they're doing deals with 80 stakeholders involved on the customer side because they're stitching together platforms and business units and geographies and they've got 80 people trying to make one decision. And it's how does that, and it's your point is like, how the bleep is that supposed to even happen? I mean, sometimes when I look at the world of buying today, this is tongue and cheek and it's not at the same time. I'm kind of amazed that commerce still happens at all. It's like how and the answer is because commerce has to happen. You still have to buy certain things. You have to fulfill orders and replenish and all that. So, but it does honestly make me wonder. And I mean this sincerely is how much more commerce could happen if it were just a little bit easier for customers to make a decision if they were a little less overwhelmed by their own internal decision making complexity. If they were a little less overwhelmed by the amount of the massive amount of information that's out there, if they're less a little less overwhelmed with their inability or their struggle to just align on what are they trying to do in the first place. And this to me is the big opportunity today. So, if you think of challenge, you're going back to where we started. Right, Challenger was a story of how can I as a seller differentiate myself today in this current marketplace given how everyone else is selling and showing up at the time in 2011 to say 2019 with an insight about the customer's organization helped them make money or save money in ways they hadn't fully anticipated was a really powerful way to stand apart from most sellers because most sellers were still showing up and throwing up with product and features and benefits. Somewhere around 2015, however, as you know, because you lived through this too, I think I think it was like one morning, I don't know in the spring. Every single CEO woke up in the morning, looked in the mirror and said, I've got it. I know how we're going to stand apart. We're going to become a thought leader. Right. So, everyone decided on the same day that we're all going to be a thought leader and being a thought leader is going to allow us to stand out in the marketplace. And so they all doubled down a marketing. God love marketing. My best friends in the world all said, I can run with that. I know what to do with that mandate. So, they invented something called marketing, content marketing. And then all of a sudden here comes MarTech saying, I got stuff I can sell you for that. And then there's marketing automation. And then we got better data. And so now we're spamming the world, not just with content, but frankly with really good content. I call this the Smartness Arms Race. We're all trying to stand out by being outsmarting everyone else. And it's somewhat of a canned line, but I think you go with me on this, which is, the Smartness Arms Race is ended in a tie. And the only one to lose is your customer because they're out there just like everybody, you're telling me to zig, you're telling me to zig, you're telling me to go on a completely different access. You all have data, you all have events. I don't even know what to do. And even if I could figure it out, I've got 79 other people in my organization. I got to get on board. It's just too hard. And I'll tell you, I think MarTech's misunderstand this point a lot because they get all wound up in that stat that says, oh, your buyer has gone this far in purchase journey before they ever talked to you. And so they figured it all out. And we should just get out of their way and be order takers. And I'm like, dude, they've spent this huge amount of time. That's true. And they've looked at all this stuff. But nobody knows how to make sense out of any of it. Exactly. Like all of its contradictory. Yeah. Right. And so, and it's funny. I was presenting this back and this goes back to the art. It's exactly right. So you mentioned the sense-making for sales article in HBR, which you know, it was as my bioline, but it was put a link to it in the show. Yeah. It's in HBR. I think it's January of 2022 if I'm not mistaken. And again, as I mentioned, it's a it's a gardener. It's my bioline, but it's a team effort. So behind it, I just, I'm a Nebraska. And I'm very humble. We like to. But it's all my colleagues. Yeah, we got it. Okay, I'll get everybody should read. Read my art. I just like read my book or read my article. I'd put the the thing about it that's really interesting is it takes us a starting point. The fact that customers are overwhelmed. And so you're telling me to Zigg, they're telling me to Zigg, everybody's got data. I don't know what to do. I think I was just studying this longer and look at it longer. I've got a little stick that I do in my in my sales kickoff key notes around this idea, which I actually quite like because it's quite true is this same phenomena shows up for all of us as consumers. So on the consumer side, you know, that there's a long version. I'll give you the short version, but it's kind of like going to have you ever done this April, you go to Amazon, and you try to buy something relatively simple. The one I usually tell those like a dongle because because it's literally happened, right? And you think this is going to be you're like, it's a little thing like how hard could it be? You think right? And the next thing, you know, you got to be a dongle expert. Right. You've got to think dongle. You'll laptop the USB C because everything's changed. Now you USB C I put it and put it in the specs. Amazon's like, no problem. Here's 1500 options. Okay, I didn't see that coming, but but Amazon tries to help you by saying here's Amazon's choice and recommended great. So you're right. So you take a look and say, okay, looks good. Yep, yep, you have 15 bucks. No big deal. You said, let me just read a couple reviews real quick and then we're good to go. And you read a view. It's like, oh, hold on five people set up broken five minutes and everyone else loved it. And I'll have better look at another one. And like three hours later, you're still shopping for a $15 dongle. And now you don't hate Amazon, but you kind of hate yourself, right? And it's like, it's so annoying. And so at some point you get so fresh, I did this with gym shorts. It's a pair of freaking gym shorts. Right. Right. And it literally just been all stuff. And at some point you realize two and a half considered purchase and it turned into a very considered purchase. Like, exactly. But it happens. Go ahead. No, no, no, no, go ahead. So I have this bit that I've do it in common songs right now, but me go to buy a toilet. Same thing. Exactly. Same thing. Like my contractor's like, buy a toilet. I'm like, how hard can that be? How hard can you get a toilet store and toilet salesman is like, well, what kind of toilet do you want? And I was like, dude, one that flushes like, what the round? You want the oblong? Do you want the wider? Do you want the almond? Do you want the power? So many things. And then there's all this tech like gravity assistance, blood, and all this stuff. And we haven't gotten to the bidet part. I do it's like holy background. Exactly. So many things. And so then and you think like, if it's that hard to buy a toilet, imagine trying to buy a million bucks worth of enterprise software. Like, exactly. Stuff. It's legitimately difficult to figure out. Because what happens up by the way, Amazon's got a solution for this. So I find really fascinating. I always I like to bring my wife into these stories just because I think it's hilarious. But the, but my wife and I both shop a lot on Amazon. It's everyone. So I check on her account. And she has because because Amazon has a solution for this. They have a little button. And the button says save for later. And if you press save for later at the pain stops, right? It's like, it all just goes away. And my wife has 580 items saved for later in her Amazon account. That's the truth. So so this is like, there's 581 times a low considered purchase sold out completely because of just frustration or timed out or whatever. And then to your point, now you scale this up to multi million dollar purchases with five to 10 to 15 people involved. And again, I come back to it's kind of amazing to me that commerce still happens at all. And then the other thing you've got with that five to 15 people is like, you know, if I buy the wrong gym shorts, you know, it's not the end of the world. You're a presser to be sending back, right? Yeah. Like it's not the end of the world. But you know, but if I make a bad decision in this million dollar thing, there's absolutely stakes for me in my career. Like, maybe I'm going to get past the road. Maybe I'm going to get fired. Maybe I'm going to get like the pressure on that decision is nothing like buying a can of water. Right. And you can't do the whole zappos thing where it's like, I'll just buy six pairs and send three of them back. Right? You can say, you might all buy three CRIB systems and said, two back. It doesn't work that way. And this is giant project to get it deployed and everybody's there's all these people involved and everybody's life is going to change. Like, again, it's amazing. Anybody sticks their neck out to make these decisions like these people that are shaping these deals. Like have to have guts. They do. And this is why I think so many times it comes back down to, you know, we better look at this a little bit longer. We better study this a little bit more. We better talk to a few more people. We better come. And the thing is, by the way, this is if this is assuming that they've even made it to the point where they're picking a supplier, but this still has to happen at the solution level and initially at the problem level, right? Because you have to have this discussion which problems are worthy of our attention and solving this year given our limited budget in the first place. You have to have the debate around the problem. Then once you figure out, okay, this problem is worthy of our time and running. resources here, what's the right solution? Irrespective of suppliers, it on-prem or cloud, it is it outsource, whatever it might be. And then I got to get to who's the right supplier. So you have to go through this process three times. And this is what, and by the way, when we back solve it from the sales side, what happens more often not is we solve for the supplier side first, so the supplier selection problem first. So we convince our customer that we're the best supplier for that particular problem, but then they decide that they're going to solve for a different problem altogether. And you wind up being the supplier's number one solution for their number three problem, and that's a really bad place to be. Right? - Yeah. - So this is, so bottom line, so this all goes back to a question. You asked about, I don't have 20 minutes to go, sorry. But around like, - Just a little while, I loved this. - So like if we think about challenger today, none of this is a challenger, because this wasn't nearly the problem 11 years ago that it is today. So it's not like we left it out or we forgot or we made a mistake. It just wasn't our reality then as it is today. And so when you play out challenger in this kind of environment, and it's a little unfair to challenger, which again, I'm huge, I still completely support, and I'm behind the data supports, it's 100%. But nonetheless, the word that I think of when I think of challenger today is the word context. Because we have to think about what this challenger look like when you play it out inside of this context, which is if I show up to the customer with an insight and say, "Here's a different way to think about your business, "a new way to save money." It's very possible that customers will say, "Great, just put that on the stack of 15 other insights "and white papers that I'll get to it when I can." It's just not helpful. But if I show up all of the sense making for sales article and say, "There's a lot of information out there." I would imagine you've seen this video series, you probably see these two white papers, "Here's our insight, here's our take on it." Imagine it's a lot, it's a little overwhelming. Oh, you have no idea. Why don't we take a step back? And let me see if you're open to it. Maybe I can just help you kind of frame, put a framework around all of it. And just kind of help you think of, irrespective of the content you read. And we think these three pieces, in particular one from Gartner or one from whatever, we think these are the better ones. But whatever you read, here, based on, here's the phrase I always like to use. And working with other customers like you, social proof, I'm just a broker of information. And working with other customers like you. I know I do too, I've used it a lot. I've built my whole career off that phrase, I think. But then working with other customers like you, here are the kinds of questions we find are most urgently in need of an answer. So what I've done is I've taken something as very big and very overwhelming. And I've just tried to chalk the field a little bit. I've tried to chalk the pitch. So just narrow it down and put a framework around it, such that you still have degrees of freedom to make your own choices within that framework. But it's a little less overwhelming. And I call this frame making. So if, if challenge is all about being frame breaking, you know, changing the way you think about your business, this is all about being frame making. And I think if, if, like, if challenge yourself, this is pepper, or we are yin and yang, I don't know what it is, I don't know, Bonnie and Clyde. I don't pick whatever peria like, but this is the other side of challenger that we need to talk about today is, how can I help customers feel more confident in their ability to navigate their own internal decision-making complexity? How can I help them feel more confident in navigate information? How can I help them feel more confident in aligning with their colleagues in the alignment they have with their colleagues around what they're trying to do in the first place? Yeah. I love this idea of decision confidence. It's so interesting. It's so interesting. Such a big idea. Like, tactically, like, you know, like, so if I'm in marketing and sales tactically, what can I do to help ramp up that confidence? Like, you know, so like, one of the things that, that I'm talking a lot about with my clients right now is like, in positioning, we're trying to position against, you know, other folks. And a lot of times what we have is the customer needs like a rubric of, like, all the different approaches they could use to solve the problem. And we generally don't talk about that in sales, but we could. Right. And every time we do, like, when I've seen companies that do it, they'd say, hey, like, there's three different ways you could solve this problem. You could solve it like this or like this or like this. And let's talk about the pluses and minuses or the pros and cons of each of these approaches. It's just such a power move in sales, in my opinion. But I'm interested in your opinion on like, how do we get to this decision confidence? Like, what can we do in marketing and sales? The EODM. So I think that's an example. I think it's a powerful example of what to do. Which again, what you just shared is an idea of putting a framework around it, right? So it seems like, right. And making, this is why we call travel agents today, even though we can book everything online, because if you've tried to book a Disney trip lately, it's impossible because there's so much information. It's like, you call someone's like, "Didn't help me figure out what I should even be asking." And it's your toilet story, right? It's like, I don't know what are the attributes of a toilet that I really need to be worried about. Exactly. And not only do I not know that, I don't want to be an expert in toilets. Like, I don't want to be a waste with toilet. I don't want to fill my purchase space with toilet. And now play that on the consumer level, we can play like buying a home, buying a car. You know, insurance. I'm sure it's going to be another example. Like, it's over the well-revised stakes. Like, if I screw that up, bad things could happen. There's so many options. And like, it's amazing. And the insurance gets bought. So one of the very, these sort of tactical ways, is where in the first things I did when I joined ecosystems of a year and a half ago is, and we used to do this at C.E.B. all the time, is maturity models. So-- I love the maturity model. I'm the man. I probably jumped the shark because everyone has one. But for the moment, at least, I think there's still some meat on this bone. But, you know, the maturity model is-- Small companies don't use these enough. Big companies don't have to do it. But startups-- every time I talk about maturity models and startups, like, not that many are using them. And everybody's like, whoa. Totally. Or it's another-- It's making things. Whoa. The Kissing Cousin of a maturity model? Is that gross? Sorry. But the diagnostic exercise or some sort of self-assessment-- some sort of framework that helps me ask this specific limited number of questions to figure out where I am on some sort of tear point rubric is another one. It's just a fancy pedagogical word, like the word pedagogical. But it's 100%. It's all it is is a framework. It's something that takes something big and overwhelming and boils it down to something that's manageable, scalable, and repeatable. And that's, I think, customers find-- And again, this is what your point about sales and marketing. I can build a maturity model and put it on my website. I can build a maturity model and put it in a video. I can hand it to my sales reps. I can go direct-- I see sales and marketing today more or less more than anything as channels to market more than different-- there are 100% different-- marketing largely owns a brand and things like that. That is absolutely true. But I'm more interested in digital communications, the customers and human-led communications, which traditionally are owned by sales and marketing. That's where I tend to camp out. But what you do around positioning is it sits at a higher level and is super, super important. But anyway, so that's-- Not that you buyers guide. Buyers guide is-- Buyers. I don't know why everybody doesn't have a buyer guide. It's super hard to buy. Like, why not give me a guide? We got guides for everything else. Like, why don't we have a buyer guide? Why not have a stakeholder-- like a sales-- excuse me, a stakeholder alignment coaching guide. One chapter's on-- here are the five people in your company that need to be involved. Here are the questions that are likely to ask. Here are the objections that are likely to have. Here's the spreadsheet or the data or the PowerPoint slides that you need to go have that conversation-- not with me, but with your own colleague. It's very practical stuff. And notice, this is, again, it's not inconsistent with Challenger. But it's sort of beyond Challenger. It's like, we didn't talk about any of this stuff in the book. Because, again, it wasn't really part of the-- it wasn't as necessary than as it is now. Yeah, it also was quite part of the scope. This was more specifically about sales stuff. But I love how all this stuff does all fit together. Tell me about this book. So you write in this book. Like, when's this book-- I'm telling you about it right now. I'm going through it. When we need dates, we need specifics. We need people to say they're writing a book. I said I was writing a book for like five years before I actually popped the book out. And then the book came. And then immediately after I was like, I got this new book idea. And it took me like four years. There you go. So I'm in the process of essentially clearing the decks for 2024. And there's a lot of change. Personally, 2024 is-- I'm going to put one or two very large bets on the table. And this will be one of them. And hopefully, next couple of weeks, we'll tell the tale of the tape. But hopefully we'll have it out in the fall. So fingers crossed. So I know. So I didn't-- Oh, man. What's that? You've got that book written already. You're going to fall. Yeah. It's up here. It's-- Fortunately, it's not on papers. So that's the thing. And then there's also a set of best practices. So I want to do-- it's like we used to do it-- is like show me an actual company that does an example of a great maturity model, or a diagnostic, or a sense-making. What does that look like in practice? And I've got lots of leads. Oh, we can talk about this. I've got a handful of my clients that I think just do an-- You're my new best friend. Ains of job with this. E.M. in particular-- And I'm having him on the podcast soon too. But the guy's over at Postman, in my opinion, have done a very, very good job of this with a very technical product for a very technical audience. And just beautiful. I love it. You know the other one that I'm super interested in. I was just talking to company last week. It's not in the clear yet. Maybe someday, but hopefully. But I've seen versions of this over the years. Stay-cold-our-alignment workshops, which has let me as a seller take my selling hat off and put my facilitation hat on. And if that's too hard, you're going to bring it on a subject matter expert or someone, right? But to sit down, ideally, literally face-to-face in a room with the five or six different customer stakeholders that are involved in this conversation or in this decision. And my point is not to try to sell them. My point is just to facilitate a discussion among themselves to get agreement on what the bleep are they even trying do in the first place. So you start with objectives, you work through objectives, then tactics, then metrics, then targets, then timelines, and get an alignment, all those things. I've got this riff that I've developed, which is, you know, we're so convinced that we need to convince our customers of our values. So there's a lot of value selling and value-based selling approaches right now. And if I can just demonstrate my value to you, you're going to say, "Oh my God, you're so valuable. I'm going to buy," right? But the, what I've become really convinced of in the value world is that we think, we tend to think that showing our value, demonstrating our value to our customers, going to generate confidence. And then what happens, so you build this really great business case, this business calculator, whatever it is you show it to your customer, and they look at it and say, "No, I agree with the math, but we've decided to go in a different direction." Right? I agree with that, but it's not based on our data, but it's like your calculation, your business case, dies a death of a thousand doubts, but not because they doubt your math, because it's not the math that's the problem, it's the context of the math. And what I've kind of learned, and what we all know to be true, is that rather than using value to demonstrate your, excuse me, rather than using value to generate customer confidence, what if we use value to demonstrate customer confidence? Specifically, it's to demonstrate their confidence in themselves that they're aligned on these five dimensions, on objectives and tactics and metrics and targets and timelines, so that when you show them their value, if it's an output of those five things and are aligned to those five things, then the value makes sense. If they're misaligned on any one of those five levels, your value will always be suspect, not because they doubt your value, but because they doubt their agreement on what they're even trying to do. That's right. And so that's the alignment workshop idea. I love it. I love it. It's cool, isn't it? This stuff is so interesting. By the way, the other thing I appreciate though, is like, can I just say this not tongue in cheek, selling is freaking hard. I mean, oh my God, this is hard, because buying is hard. All of this is a little overwhelming. You know, I mean, it's like, can't I just show up and tell them what I sell and say it's really great and have them buy and just be done with it? And it's just, yeah, that's the dream. That's what everybody wants. But you know, the dream, the dream one step beyond that is, can't they just self serve themselves and click on the bottle? Well, we can get ourselves out of the gym. Sure. It doesn't even work with gym shorts or dongles. Why would it work with multi-million dollar purchases? But yeah, you're like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You're being. By the way, there's a mention decision comes all of this takes us a starting point, something we found a gardener. You know, several years ago, probably about 2017. It's the first time to show it up. I think we're still CB at the time. It doesn't matter somewhere in there. But the, we began doing these studies of buyer behavior. We found that the single biggest driver of customers making a large scale purchase decision by far was the degree to which they were confident, not in you or your brand or your product, but they were confident in themselves. And the, and the decision they were making on behalf of their company, did we ask the right questions? Have we done enough research? Have we thoroughly explored alternatives? Right? Notice all of that stuff is supplier agnostic. It's all customer centric. And we, and it's funny. So then we all wake up to one day and say, Oh, you're right. We need to be more customer centric. I know how we'll be customer centric. We'll be a thought leader and a trusted advisor. But notice being a thought leader is, yeah, do you think I'm a leader? Trust advisor. Do you trust me? All of the things that we do in the name of customer centric, you are still deeply supplier centric. And, and what's, I did a one of my breakdown videos. And so I did these weekly breakdown videos. And the, the, I think the thing we have to think about is less about supplier centric versus customer centric and just start thinking supplier agnostic. Take yourself completely out of the equation. And just ask, what is, what are customer struggling with just to make a decision not to buy from you, but just to make a decision and help them with that. That's pretty cool. That's so cool. Now, this is our future. I don't know how, like I, I seriously don't know how, here's what needs to happen. Robots need to take over the planet. And my good, buddy over at Gartner, Don Shibner, I finished colleague. They wrote a book about when machines start buying and selling. And I think that's, we handed all over to the machine. So algorithm from algorithms. Then we can all just go sit on the beach or something. Or something. Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you want to, you want to leave us with any parting smarts? You got anything else? Oh gosh. Where can people find you if they're interested in your stuff? So, the best place to find me really is on LinkedIn. I tend to hang out there a lot. I have a website now Brent Addamson.net. You can find me over there. I do birthday parties and Burmetsviz and sales kickoffs and that kind of thing. And the meantime to pay the bills while I get the book out. And there would be more to come. 2024 is going to be a big year. But here's what I want to do. Actually, can you take two minutes? Because you and I live in these adjacent worlds. Yeah. And this is, and this is not, no one put me up to this. I'm just, I have not had a chance to start with your new book yet. And that's, I'll just be honest with you. And I'm excited to do it. Can you give me the two minutes on it? Give me the thumbnail on your new book. So I'm super excited for it. Okay. So how do you hear? Here's it. Here's what the new books about. It actually borrows a lot of these ideas like from, from this, from Challenger Hill, from Challenger customer, from this sense making stuff, from Mass New Book, Joel Tofag. And so here was the problem I was trying to solve in the new book. So I'm working with clients and we're working on positioning. And we work through the component pieces of positioning. We have this cross functional team. We get to the end of that exercise. Everybody's like, this is great. We're all in agreement alignment. Here's what we compete with. Here's how we're different. This is, you know, this is a really good fit for our stuff. This is the market we're going to go win. And marketing's happy. And they go off and they build all this great, you know, marketing stuff, messaging and thought leadership stuff and whatever. And sales is like, mm-hmm. This is all great. And then off they go. And nobody knows how to tell the story. Yes. How do we actually take that positioning and wrap a story around it? And in particular, how do we take this positioning and turn it in a first call deck? That's it. Like just that simple. Like how do we take positioning map? And so that the new book is basically, here's how we build a first call deck. And so it starts with our insight, which is kind of a Challenger idea. But this idea of, here's what we believe the problem behind the problem is or the problem inside the problem. Or this is our point of view on the problem. But then there is a discrete step where we map out the market and we give them this rubric. So we say, look, you know, we do this a lot. And here's what we see. We see that there are three or four different approaches you could take to this problem. And here's the pluses and minuses of these. And then we can also do discovery at this step because it's a natural place to do discovery. What do you think? What do you guys been seeing? What do you guys wrestling with? We do discovery. And then what we're trying to get is alignment on the point of view. So we're like, so, you know, can we all agree that if this is what's going on? And if these are our options, can we all agree that in a perfect world, we'd have an option that ticks these boxes. Yeah. And then if the customer goes, well, yeah, we would. And you're like, great. That this is what we do. And so the idea is, it's a first call. We're not getting into all the gory details. It's a big, big deal. We're going to have 9,000 calls after this. If it's a smaller deal, maybe we close the deal on this call. Yeah. This idea of how do we set up the first call where we kind of expose our point of view on the market? We draw a picture of the whole market and say, this is how we look at it, have a discussion with the customer. And then we get our differentiated value. Here's what we can do for you that no one else can. On the table, you know, kind of level set at the very beginning of a sales process here so we can do. So that's what the idea is brilliant. It's brilliant. It's, I don't need to write the book anymore. I just, I'll just refer to the rest. No, no, it's like, no, your book, your book is very much needed in this thing. Like mine is trying to solve this really specific little thing. But in the right way, it's an example of frame making. It's, I can't wait to read it. That's it's genius. I love it. Yeah. I've been wanting to. I promise. I've been really busy with it on my list. Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. I'll send you one. Christmas present. Thank you. But I think that that, you know, it's interesting to me that despite us knowing all this stuff, if you see what happens in a first call in sales, it is almost always a product walk through. Yes. Yes. Almost always that. Even for stuff that's really expensive. It's amazing to me that a first call is usually, hey, we're these people. And let me just show you the product. Look, there's 15 drop down menus. I'm going to walk you through every single 15 like it is amazing to me. How that is kind of the state of the art, even though like we know better. We should know better. Here's the hill. I think I want to die on a lease for next five years. And, you know, it's as far as anyone who's dying any hill. But the is instinctively and to some degree, officially through training sellers so dramatically want to change the way customers think about us, the supplier and the sales calls. Like my job is to go in there and change the way this customer thinks about us, our product, our brand. And everything I've seen in all this research is bigger picture ideas that the best way to really drive up the likelihood of a sale isn't the change way the customer thinks about you, but the change way customer thinks about themselves. And if you approach that sale from that posture, right? If you approach that conversation of posture, it's like, I'm here not to get you to think differently about me. I'm here to get you to think differently about you. And at the heart of that, I think April is this very human story, which I just, which deeply resonates with me just as a, you know, it's a human, but also it's like a liberal arts guy. Maybe I don't know, but the, all my trainings liberal arts. So, but it's that it's kind of like the basis of really great friendships and great, you know, marriages and relationships. The whole thing about when you love someone or you really enjoy being around, it's like, I love you because I love you, but I really love you because I love me when I'm around you. And that, you know, how can I, how can I create an exchange and experience with a customer such as the customer kind of loves themselves just a little bit better as a result of their presence or engagement with me. That's, that's a superpower. And that's what your best people are doing already. Oh my God. I love this. I can't wait for this book. This is going to be like the best book. I don't know about that. But I could put it under the other leg of the kitchen table. They don't want wobble in either direction. So that would be perfect. [LAUGHTER] That's so awesome. All right, well, thanks so much. I appreciate-- Absolutely. --one of the things you-- Thank you. --is been so much fun. Cheers. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're listening to this podcast, and you're thinking to yourself, hey, my company could use some help with positioning, maybe we should talk. So as a consultant, I work with tech companies, but very specifically, B2B tech companies that have a sales team. I don't really have a size requirement. I work with very, very large businesses, but I also work with growth stage companies that are as small as 10, 20, 30 million revenue. The work I do with companies is focused on getting a very tight definition of how you win in the market, and then taking that and translating it into a really compelling story that clearly answers the question, why pick you over the other guys? If you're interested in learning about how we might work together, you can visit aprondonfer.com/consulting. Thanks again for listening.